With Impartial Tread
by Cap'n Pirate Monkey
Summary: Post-Colonisation. Krycek is charged with babysitting the world's last hope, but Mulder is a little more stubborn than he'd planned for. Written as part of the Help Haiti appeal 2010. AU, in which Existence happened very differently.


_It has taken until September , nearly a year after they arrived, before the haze of black smoke hanging perpetually over the remains of New York City has begun to clear. With all the buildings levelled and the city still smouldering, reduced to rubble and dust, it is frighteningly easy to forget New York was ever there. _

_There had been survivors, scattered pockets of them taking cover in the Subway stations, cowering uselessly beneath ruined buildings. After a time, the aliens picked most of them off too. Thorough, if nothing else. December saw their ships come in like birds of prey, precious little preamble before the main event. They came at night. Some considered this a blessing. Those who died in their sleep were able to avoid the shock, the complete re-think of thousands of years of human civilisation, which came with the stark realisation that all along, we were not alone. That we ought to have believed while we had the chance. That I was right all along._

_There's no vindication in knowing this, no pleasure in being right. Because even as I stand staring out across what is left of the state of New York from my vantage point high in the Catskills, I'm horribly aware of the threat which follows us, reducing humans to ash and bone and entire cities to mere foundations. The truth is no longer out there. It's right here, and I see it in every body we encounter; we could have stopped this, Scully, if only they'd listened to us._

_The Roman poet Horace once said "Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door, and at the palaces of kings". Reports over the radio say California has been wiped clean off the map. I guess Horace was right. Beverley Hills has gone the same way as the Bronx. Money is meaningless in this so-called "brave new world". _

_We've come across survivors on our way, most of them shell shocked civilians hanging pathetically on to their possessions as if they matter. There are small colonies formed across the country but without a means to fight back they're going to be dead within weeks. We've made it this far because we keep moving, and because we know how to fight. I wish there were a more peaceful approach..._

"Bullshit", Krycek interrupted rudely. Mulder looked up, exasperated. He pushed the 'stop' button on the antiquated tape player, a hulking relic he had salvaged a while back from an abandoned garage in West Virginia.

"What's bullshit?" he asked, in a voice which suggested he didn't care very much for Krycek's opinion on the matter.

Krycek snorted. His good hand was tucked in his pocket, his prosthetic hanging loosely at his side. Somehow, even in this desolate excuse for a civilisation he still found himself possessed of a strange vanity and wore his black leather gloves, disguising the fake digits. "Everything. Your little speech there. Quoting Roman poets. What's the fucking point?"

Mulder sighed. "I don't expect you to give a damn, Krycek."

"It's a waste of time," Krycek continued. He looked past Mulder at the rolling valleys of the New York Catskills. They might have been a thing of great beauty once upon a time, before the invasion. Now they were skeletal, stripped of most of their vegetation. A few clusters of brown, dessicated trees reached defiantly upwards into the grey sky, a curiously hopeless sight. "You spend hours recording tapes nobody will ever listen to. You talk self indulgent crap and tell me they're for Scully." He shook his head. "I mean, what is your grand plan, Mulder? If you find Scully? Then what? You think making her listen to the fucking Alien Invasion audio handbook is going to make the slightest difference?"

Mulder smiled. Just a little, but enough to penetrate the thick, unflattering beard he had grown. Smiles were a rare commodity now. "Maybe not, but it's a damn sight more useful than anything you're doing."

"I'm fixing the goddamn car. The _goddamn car_ you chose." Krycek cast a dismissive wave at the Plymouth Barracuda Mulder had insisted upon. Formerly a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, the red bodywork hung at unnatural angles, dented horribly in several places. "Hell of a time to have a mid-life crisis,_ Fox."_

Mulder didn't respond. He stared out over the ruined valleys, squinting against the thin stream of sunlight trickling through the clouds overhead. For a long time, he said nothing. Krycek wiped his oil-stained palm on his jeans. Mulder seemed to be full of contemplative silences these days. A chill wind blew from the north, a sure sign of the coming winter.

_Winter is good_ Krycek thought, and he knew Mulder must have been thinking the same. Cold weather disabled the aliens, made them sick and sluggish. The idea of it pleased the Russian in him.

"We're so close," Mulder murmured.

"A week, maybe," Krycek agreed amicably. "Less if I can get the car working again."

Mulder nodded. His hair hung long and limp against the sides of his face, in desperate need of a wash. He looked tired, weary. A man losing his edge. Krycek wavered between pity and disgust at his state. Hadn't he lost everything too? And yet here was Mulder, hiding behind his stupid facial hair and whining endlessly about Newfoundland and how he hoped Scully would be there. Krycek snorted. This wasn't the Mulder he remembered, the man whose dogged determination and tireless pursuit of his accursed _truth_. Now it was all Krycek could to just to keep him moving from day to day.

_Shit_ he thought, folding his long limbs into a crouch. The ground beneath him was dry, coated in a thin film of dust as if long abandoned. _How the hell did I wind up as Mulder's babysitter anyway? This wasn't part of the deal._

But it had been, he reminded himself wearily. In fact that pretty much _had _been the deal. Keep Mulder moving, Skinner had asked, grimacing visibly even as he shook Krycek's remaining hand. _"I should have killed you in that parking garage,"_ he had said bitterly. Krycek had smirked. _"You'd really be in trouble now if you had" _After all, Skinner had sought him out, knowing he of all people would have survived the initial invasion. That he would be the only one with the strength and patience to journey from West Virginia to Newfoundland without getting them both killed. Krycek had smiled at this; he could practically see it sticking in Walter fucking Skinner's throat.

"Mulder," he said quietly.

The other man grunted in response, barely registering his presence.

Krycek struggled against his rising anger as he spoke, teeth bared. "You can't keep on like this."

Mulder turned to look at him, a thin figure swathed in dark green fatigues and a knitted beanie hat like a damn hobo, fragile and tired but with a dangerous spark in his eyes. "Like what, Krycek?" he asked, impatient. "Like everything I've ever known is in pieces around me? Like we've spent the last few months running endlessly from the colonists despite _knowing_ that they _will_ catch us, maybe not now, maybe not in a few weeks but they sure as hell will, no matter how fucking far you drive that piece of crap?" His hands bunched into tight fists at his sides. "Because I think I can keep on like this for a very long time."

Krycek raised his eyebrows, a little stunned at his outburst. It was the most animated Mulder had been in months outside of his ridiculous fucking tapes. And although he was standing there with his fists bunched and his lower lip pooched like a sulking toddler, it was a vast improvement. Anger was good. Hell, any emotion outside of moping self-indulgence was good.

"Don't give me that crap," Krycek dismissed, drawing himself back up into a standing position. "You think you're the only man on Earth who knows how it feels to lose everything. God, Mulder. You don't think the rest of us understand that?" He let this statement hang in the air for a few moments, ever the master of persuasion. "Listen to me. I have nothing. Actual, tangible nothing. The whole fucking point of this little road trip is for you. It's to find Scully. It's to give you back some of what you've lost so you can...pick up from where you left off, strap on your gun, go popping off aliens."

Mulder didn't respond. He still wore that pathetically indignant expression, tempered a little by the cartoonish beard-and-hat combination. Krycek resisted the growing urge to punch him in the teeth.

"Fact is, Mulder, you really are humanity's last hope. And it fucking kills me to say that, really. To think that our last hope has turned into a whining little bastard bathing happily in his own misery. Skinner expects better, and that's why he's using up the last of his resources to get you to where you'll be safe."

"For how long?" Mulder countered, but there was no vehemence in his tone, no real bite. _Thank the gods, he's actually using his goddamn brain. _Krycek exhaled through clenched teeth.

"A long time. Newfoundland is cold. They won't dare venture that way until spring at least." He didn't want to get Mulder's hopes up, but there was a good chance the colonists wouldn't venture that far north until summer. All of their plans were based around this precarious assumption, and more to the point, around the assumption that Mulder would be in a physical and mental state to take charge. Given the Jerry Garcia impersonation he was currently attempting, Krycek wasn't sure half a year would be enough time. _Scully, you'd better be alive and well when we get there_ he thought, staring up into the thick grey cloud as if he could magically project his thoughts across the border.

"Jesus, Krycek." Mulder muttered. His gaze dropped to the floor, fists unclenching. It was as if he had never been told all this before. Krycek wondered if he'd ever really been listening, if Mulder had been meandering along in his own storytime tape making, pony car driving fantasy land until he had finally found it in himself to kick Mulder up the ass. "What makes you think I'm humanity's last hope? That's...quite an accolade."

"Don't flatter yourself," Krycek said dryly. "If it weren't for my goddamn arm, I'd have squeezed you for all that you knew and left you back in West Virginia. Then Skinner could've wiped your ass and held your hand the whole way."

Mulder regarded him with undisguised hostility, as if he knew Krycek would have done exactly that, given the opportunity. Perversely, this pleased Krycek.

"You're the last hope," Krycek continued, "because of what you know. Because you've seen these bastards before, in the flesh. Because you have access to knowledge and resources we don't. You're not the Messiah or anything, Mulder. You're just the best we have right now." His eyes met Mulder's, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, there was life in them. Halle-fucking-lujah. The brain was finally ticking again.

There was a long silence. Mulder stared at Krycek, at his somehow well-kept appearance (how the hell did he stay clean shaven like that?) and at the left side of his body, the unnatural stiffness of which betraying the false limb he tried so hard to hide. He seemed pretty unaffected by the invasion (and subsequent destruction) of the civilised world.

"What have you lost?" Mulder asked, after a time.

"What?" Krycek asked irritably.

"You said you had nothing. What did you lose?"

Krycek eyed him with suspicion. Was this a trick question? Some kind of ridiculous qualifier to earn his trust? Who gave a fuck what he'd lost? Certainly nobody had ever cared pre-colonisation; why should the impending apocalypse change that?

"My arm," he replied.

Mulder laughed bitterly. "You've had years to come to terms with that, Krycek. No, really. What did you lose?"

"Why do you want to know?" Krycek asked. It had begun to rain. Fat droplets of water hit the floor, kicking up plumes of grey dust. They had to get moving, to find shelter. Pre-apocalyptic storms were violent and unpredictable enough without making yourself lightning-fodder by hanging around on mountaintops.

Mulder shrugged. Behind him, in the endless grey distance, a thick streak of lightning split the clouds in two, a bright flash in the dull sky. "Guess it'd make you seem a little human."

Krycek inhaled deeply. He thought about his mother, sat alone in her little Czech apartment, a withering little bird of a woman in a rocking-chair with sad Russian eyes and a thin, downturned mouth. Probably dead for years, and that was no doubt for the best. He thought about those few weeks when the Consortium had been heading for it's demise, like a fat and bloated calf to the slaughter. How he'd lit a smoke, so unlike him, and sat alone in the boardroom, at the head of the table. How certain he'd been that he would survive and make good on all those hollow promises the Cigarette Smoking Man had showered him with, back when he was young and impressionable. He thought about Marita, about her cool blue eyes, about her pale limbs tangled in the sheets in her New York bedroom and the beads of sweat glittering on her flushed face. About the way she had betrayed him and how, after all these years, after her tearful apologies post-Fort Marlene, it still hurt him. Just a little bit.

"People I loved," he said at last, and to his disgust he sounded almost melancholy. "Missed chances. I'm not fucking superhuman, Mulder." Then, quickly; "Get back in the car. We need to move before the storm kicks in."

He turned his back on Mulder and headed towards the Plymouth. And he thought he could hear, over the sound of coin-sized raindrops bouncing off the aluminium, the sound of Mulder chuckling quietly to himself, perhaps at the notion that Alex Krycek had ever cared about anyone other than himself. Or perhaps at the idea that he had ever missed a chance. Either way, it pissed him off. He buckled his seat belt and started the ignition.

Mulder slipped into the passenger seat, holding the tape recorder on his lap. "I owe you an apology," he said, buckling his seatbelt. As the gravel crunched loudly beneath the wheels of the creaking Plymouth, he thought he saw Krycek's jaw twitch just a little. A smile, maybe?

"Don't be a sap, Mulder," Krycek dismissed. "Save it for your tapes."

"If you drive fast enough, I might not need to make any more tapes."

Krycek's eyes widened. Was this optimism? He glanced at Mulder's reflection in the rear-view mirror, at the way he no longer hung on to the tape recorder like it was some bizarre safety blanket. "That's some pretty positive thinking all of a sudden."

Mulder said nothing at first. Krycek drove on, speeding down mountain paths that might have been breathtaking once upon a time, now choked in dust and dead vegetation. To be optimistic in the face of it was quite an achievement. There was a time he would have thought Mulder capable of optimism in in any scenario if it meant coming a step closer to his truth.

"The world is in my hands, right?" Mulder replied at last, and the words sent a chill down Krycek's spine; the world in Fox Mulder's hands, God help us all. "Then I'd better get my ass into gear."

"You could start by shaving," Krycek suggested dryly.

This time Mulder did smile. Somewhere far behind them there was an explosion, a great plume of black smoke thrown up into the sky, dispersing like ink into water. Onwards to Newfoundland, thought Krycek, willing the Plymouth to last long enough to get them there before the Colonists caught up with them. Willing Scully to stay alive long enough to keep Mulder going. The world, after all, was waiting for his move.


End file.
